An interesting post was made by a fellow named Rogue5 on the [H]ardOCP forums. He claims to have talked to an ATI representative during the recent AMD tech tour. He is an active forum member since March 2000 at [H]. Another anonymous reader also sent along an email to the editors stating to know the reason for the (also rumoured) second silicon revision of R300. Read more to find out...
I was speaking with the ATi rep at the T.O. AMD Tech Tour (heh). He said: "It will have a 128bit floating point colour system!" So I commented and said how carmack let it slip that the newer hardware has done a good thing with increasing the colour depth of graphics cards and he finished my sentence by saying; "he (referring to carmack) said that 64bit colour wasn't enough! Yeah thats why the r300 supports more then needed...if there is such a thing. Basically when we release the R300 the whole industry will take a step back, and realize they are behind...r300 is truly ground breaking: Full DX9 support, which is as big a leap from DX8.1 as DX8.1 was to DX7, precision calculations both on polygon and texture information, and a whole host of other stuff that I can't really comment on." He also said: "You have no idea. The sample that Doom]I[ ran on was both ALPHA hardware as well as ALPHA drivers....the way the card is now (referring to its alpha stage) it can do 14XXX+ 3Dmarks...we will definately do our best to get it higher. Also realize that we haven't determined the final clock speeds either...the pics you have probably seen on various sites show a PRE PRE engineering sample.... Basically we WILL have a show stopper. The R300 will revolutionize the way we see graphics. In fact nothing will even be able to compete with us until Februray or March of 2k3 (I think he was talking about nVidias 6month cycle)." He said it will be out late Q3...or late fall... About the second silicon revision of R300: The problem with the first revision was that it violated Intel's AGP spec, which allows 48W maximum power consumption across the port. The high consumption was most likely due to a power hungry memory interface (this is a 256-bit memory bus, remember). The second revision of R300 was said to have arrived back from the fab about two weeks ago and solved the PS problem. However, the AIW version of the card may still require an external power supply. Source: [H]ardOCP
I was speaking with the ATi rep at the T.O. AMD Tech Tour (heh). He said: "It will have a 128bit floating point colour system!" So I commented and said how carmack let it slip that the newer hardware has done a good thing with increasing the colour depth of graphics cards and he finished my sentence by saying; "he (referring to carmack) said that 64bit colour wasn't enough! Yeah thats why the r300 supports more then needed...if there is such a thing. Basically when we release the R300 the whole industry will take a step back, and realize they are behind...r300 is truly ground breaking: Full DX9 support, which is as big a leap from DX8.1 as DX8.1 was to DX7, precision calculations both on polygon and texture information, and a whole host of other stuff that I can't really comment on." He also said: "You have no idea. The sample that Doom]I[ ran on was both ALPHA hardware as well as ALPHA drivers....the way the card is now (referring to its alpha stage) it can do 14XXX+ 3Dmarks...we will definately do our best to get it higher. Also realize that we haven't determined the final clock speeds either...the pics you have probably seen on various sites show a PRE PRE engineering sample.... Basically we WILL have a show stopper. The R300 will revolutionize the way we see graphics. In fact nothing will even be able to compete with us until Februray or March of 2k3 (I think he was talking about nVidias 6month cycle)." He said it will be out late Q3...or late fall... About the second silicon revision of R300: The problem with the first revision was that it violated Intel's AGP spec, which allows 48W maximum power consumption across the port. The high consumption was most likely due to a power hungry memory interface (this is a 256-bit memory bus, remember). The second revision of R300 was said to have arrived back from the fab about two weeks ago and solved the PS problem. However, the AIW version of the card may still require an external power supply. Source: [H]ardOCP
